


The Unhappy Ending

by Secrethomeworkassignment



Category: Dragon Age - All Media Types, Dragon Age II
Genre: Darkest Timeline, Everyone is Dead, F/M, anders critical or at least anders complicated, bummer city
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-03
Updated: 2019-09-03
Packaged: 2020-10-06 00:38:17
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,659
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20497991
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Secrethomeworkassignment/pseuds/Secrethomeworkassignment
Summary: Hawke has stayed behind in the Fade, sacrificing her life for the Inquisition's cause





	The Unhappy Ending

The sun was slowly setting over the bay, and Hawke lay with her feet up on the couch, drifting off to sleep after an especially long day. Fenris sat beside her, absently running his fingers through her dark hair as he poured hungrily over his latest acquisition, A Slave’s Life, the autobiography of the ancient liberator Shartan. 

“How widely acknowledged is Shartan’s testimony in the Southern Chantry?” Asked Fenris. Hawke opened her eyes, momentarily shaken from her slumber. “I’d never even heard it mentioned before you gave me this. Shartan’s own account seems to imply that he and the Prophet were lovers. More than imply, he says it outright.”

Hawke smiled languidly. “Sure the Chantry likes to pretend it doesn’t exist. That there is heterodox material. The belief that Andraste and Shartan were anything more than accomplices is considered part of ‘the heresy of Shartan.’”

“Heresy? That sounds very serious.” Fenris raised an eyebrow, a roguish gleam in his eye. “And what do you believe?” He asked.

Hawke nuzzled her face in his lap with a soft chuckle. “Well it’s right there in the book, inn’t?”

The evening has turned to night and the sky over Kirkwall has gone from violet to inky blue, the first stars glinting into view and reflecting off the harbor. Hawke has fallen soundly asleep. Fenris reads on. 

“And so it was after that night I never left her side. We were united in body and spirit as we were in our purpose. Andraste, my sister, my friend, you led us once to victory. I will spend my remaining days facing with you the battles to come. We came together in the dark, in conflict and strife. We brought each other back to life. You and I will never be apart.”

Hawke lay dying under Nightmare. The impenetrable darkness of the Fade lightened to a watery grey, and she is back at the Gallows, in the place where a part of her has remained these last five years. It's pouring rain in Kirkwall. Anders sits on a crate with his head in his hands. She has gone over this moment a thousand times in her memory. She approaches him. He looks up. But as he does the grey stone desaturates into a blinding light and the scene around her shifts again. 

Hawke opened her eyes to a very different looking Fade. Stars hung from an infinite ceiling. A hand reached down to touch Hawke’s face. She looked up. That face-

“What’s happening?” She murmured.

The illumined figure tucked an arm around her back and gently lifted her shoulders off the ground. 

“That’s right, up you go.” 

Hawke stared up in stunned disbelief. The figure seemed to consist entirely of light, of emptiness, but its form was one she would recognize anywhere. 

“Anders? How can you be here? I thought… That thing… I was dying.” 

His smile is tender, and achingly familiar. “Yes. You were.” 

“Maker, I’m dead.” She put a hand to his face, saw the blue light in his eyes. “Anders? Or Justice?”

“We were worried you might not recognize one without the other. So we both came.”

Hawke looked up into the eyes of the friend she had cut out of her heart, stamped out of the world of the living. She had extinguished the light in those eyes. 

“Aren’t you angry?” She whispered.

Anders placed an incorporeal hand on her cheek. “You did what you thought you had to. As I did.”

Hawke smiled at her friend, drinking in the face she never imagined she would see again. Then she dared to look around her. 

“So this is death, then? The Fade looks different. Not so strange.” A desperate flash of recollection struck her. “Fenris… Willow… I left them all alone.” 

“They’re not alone. They have Merrill and Isabela, and Aveline and Donnic, and Tomwise and Oranna and all the many, many people who love them. Don’t worry about Fenris, Hawke. He still has work to do, but when his time comes you’ll be there for him, like I’m here for you.” 

“I just wish I could tell him.”

Anders helped his friend to her feet and put an arm around her shoulders.

“Come on, Hawke. Let’s go. There are people here who have waited a long time to see you.”

Fenris prepared for the day ahead in the well-appointed hightown estate he shared with Hawke and their little daughter, the ancestral home of his wife’s late mother, Leandra Amell. He bathed, put on his armor, and made a pot of coffee in the kitchen. Merrill had already come to take the baby for the day. He took up his massive greatsword, a strip of red fabric tied around its hilt, and strapped it to his back. He opened the kitchen door, and was greeted with an unexpected sight- Varric trudging down the narrow alley. 

“Varric!” He cried. “Varric, what ho, friend? You’re back already? Where’s Hawke? 

As Varric approached, his expression answered Fenris’s question long before his friend had the chance to speak. Varric reached the door, but extended no embrace, did not even make to enter the house.

“Fenris…”

“Where’s Hawke?” Fenris searched the dwarf’s face. It looked ragged, hollow. “Varric, where is she?” He demanded. 

Varric dropped his gaze to the floor. “Fenris, I’m so sorry.” 

As night fell, Fenris paced back and forth across the marble floor of the Amell estate like a trapped animal. The spacious house felt suffocating, small and cloying as a rat hole, but Fenris didn’t think to leave. His thoughts are disordered. He was only glad that Merrill still had little Willow safe in her cozy flat in the alienage. Merrill’s house was bright and happy. The estate felt as if it was being sucked into a black hole. Fenris cursed. The curses pour out of him, but he is uncertain whether he is speaking aloud or in his heart. 

“Venhedis. You idiot. You always have to play the bloody hero, don’t you? I begged you to stay, but no, you had to go. You had to get yourself dragged into something you didn’t understand, that didn’t have a damned thing to do with us. What about your daughter? Did you spare a thought for her? Or for me? You’re so blighted selfish… Do you remember what you promised me? That we would never be apart. We were supposed to live for each other, for our family. You will be the death of me after all. Do you hear me, oathbreaker? Fool! I hope you hear me!”

A decanter on the table caught his eye. He finished the whole thing in one swig and shattered it against the wall. 

Midnight at the hanged man. A group of formidable looking men sat huddled around a table. The door swung open and a dark figure stepped in out of the rain. An elf, piss drunk and holding a sword as big as he was, drawn. His teeth gleamed in a deadly, drunken grin. 

“Any of you kaffas care to dance?”

Some hours later, Fenris leaned against the wall of a municipal dungeon, badly beaten but mostly covered in other people’s blood. His gaze was fixed to the wall in front of him. The door opened and guard captain Aveline entered. 

“Fenris? Look at me, Fenris.” 

Not happening. He didn’t even show he was aware someone had entered his cell.

“Fenris, talk to me. You killed three men. Coterie, but you didn’t know that.”

He answers with a sneer, still refusing to look at her. “Murder… disrupting the peace... If I’m not mistaken, those are hanging crimes.”

“Really, Fenris? You figure its a sin against the Maker if you take yourself out, so you’ll see if you can’t get me to do it for you? Forget it. You think that’s what Hawke would want?”

“I don’t give a damn what she would want.”

“And your daughter?” 

Fenris can’t meet Aveline’s gaze, but his face twists into a grimace of shame.

“No. You’ll stay in here tonight and pull yourself together. Tomorrow you’ll go home and you will stay out of trouble if I have to personally watch you night and day.” Aveline could tell that he didn’t want to be comforted, so she didn’t push it even though she wanted nothing more than to wrap her arms around her friend, as much for her own sake as for his. “Look… I know what it is to lose the one you love. I know there’s nothing I can say. I brought you something from home.”

Aveline hands him his copy of A Slave’s Life. It has a bookmark in it. Fenris takes it and puts it down on his bench. His face finally softens.

“What will I do without her, Aveline?” 

Some time later Fenris is alone in the cell where Aveline has left him to sleep it off. He opens A Slave’s Life to the bookmarked page near the very end. An illustration of the Prophet’s execution. Shartan kneels below the stake, forced by Hessarian to watch Andraste burn. 

“Andraste is dead. Her followers will say she didn’t scream, but she did, and every cry of pain was an arrow in my side. But between the cries, she whispered prayers and sang her chant of light. Before she was taken, she sent Havard to me with a message. She told me that I must escape before they burn me too. That I must complete our work so that her death is not in vain. I will try, my sister. I promise I will try. Though I cannot bear the thought of life without you, I will not dishonor you by abandoning our purpose. If Hessarian wished me to fear death, he should not have burned you first. I will run tonight. Perhaps I will finally lead my people and yours to freedom. Na via lerno victoria, you said to me. Only the living know victory.”


End file.
